Tuesday, 23 January 2007

I've been tagged by Gemma and now have to come up with six weird things about myself.

Before I start, I asked my husband this morning if he could come up with just one supposedly weird thing about me. He gave the obligatory reply of 'just one?' and I resisted slapping him. He refused to play.

1. My Nose #1I didn't think this was particularly weird until I read yesterday that Sara+h did this as well. She thought she was alone. She is not. When my nose itches, I rub it like mad with my knuckles. I have a small, round nose and my family tease me about how I rub it so weirdly. The cartilage actually seems kind of loose to me and I rub so hard you can actually hear it moving around making this weird clicking noise. Feels great to me. Anyone near me when I do this (I do refrain from doing it publicly, mostly) will cringe and tell me to stop being so creepy.

2. My Nose #2I have no sense of smell. I believe I was born this way but no one can be sure. I didn't figure this out though until I was about 22 and my (at the time) boyfriend and I were sitting in a car on a rainy day eating fish and chips. He was waxing lyrical about the smell of it and I said I didn't think I could smell anything. He thought I was crazy. Around the same time a friend's brother (a scientist) made a similar discovery and interrupted a meal to run out to the garden and pick all manner of herbs, crush them and shove them in my face. Nope. Couldn't smell a thing. I saw a specialist then who said he had no idea why I couldn't smell anything. It kind of explained to me why, as a chemist assistant (my part time job at uni), when men came in to buy perfume for wives, girlfriends etc and asked for my help, I used to just pick the one that had the prettiest bottle. It has advantages when living with a man, so I'm told. :-)

3. MusicMaybe because I have no sense of smell, my memory is attached mainly to music. I'll hear a song from the 70s or 80s and will have some memory of an exact time and place when I heard it. This would be OK if it was all good stuff but even the worst, most cringe worthy piece of teenybopper trash from say, 1987, will act as a kind of doorway and suddenly I'm 16 again, standing like the sad, lonely wallflower I was watching other kids at a Blue Light Disco in the MerimbulaRSL Club grinding away to that God awful song, Boom Boom Boom Let's Go Back to My Room. It has definite drawbacks. That said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being transported back to my bedroom floor in 1985 and experiencing ecstatic joy when A-ha'sTake On Me came on the radio and once again I'm 13 and my sister and I are giddy with passion for cute Norwegian boys. I'll go there again any time.

4. Song LyricsI guess this is kind of related to weird thing number three. But I can memorise song lyrics after one or two listens to a song. I'll get a new CD and my husband will turn to me and say, 'didn't you just buy this? How do you know the lyrics already?' I dunno. I just do. They stick. it works for good and bad songs alike.

5. Green StuffMy little brother once made me laugh so hard when I was eating green jelly, that I snorted the green jelly (jello, for the Americans) out of my nose. Not a good look. It's a famous story in my family.

6. Pen-pal loveWhen I was 19, I fell in love with a Ukrainian pen-pal called Yuri. I was studying Russian at the time. This was before the Internet. We had to number our letters because the Soviet postal service was so bad that letters would go missing. I was going to go to Kiev and be his wife!

People scoff and say, 'oh he just wanted a ticket to live in another country.' I say no way. He wanted very much to stay in his own country. It was a totally innocent love affair that came to nothing, but for a whole year, I loved getting letters with little flowers drawn in the margins, learning about another country etc etc. We spoke on the phone only once, for ten minutes, on a bad line. Probably one of the most awkward phone calls I've ever had in my whole life. I think it was after that things started to fade. I wonder what ever happened to him?